Are you ready for winter beers?

It’s a shot across the bow. An early distant warning. A sure sign that the end is near. This is the very first release notice we’ve seen about the pending availability of a winter beer. For crying out loud, it’s still August!

Over at Elysian Brewing they’ve got a lot, uh, brewing, so to speak. Elysian is rapidly bringing together the new production facility in Georgetown that will vastly increase the brewery’s output. They recently announced that this year’s Great Pumpkin Beer Festival will be the largest ever, which is a bit hard to imagine considering the girth of last year’s event. (This year the event will take place at the new facility in Georgetown, by the way.) On top of that, Elysian just announced the pending availability of Bifrost, the brewery’s winter seasonal beer.

Maybe Dick Cantwell and his crew at Elysian are just too busy to notice that it is still summer. Looking out the window at a sunny August day, it is hard to imagine that winter is just around the corner. I’m not really willing to entertain the notion just yet. I’m not ready to start wearing long pants again. Anyway, here is the release notice from Elysian.

A FUNNY LITTLE BEER STORY
from Dick Cantwell

Bifrost replaced our original winter ale, Valkyrie, in the seasonal rotation shortly after our dishwasher drank four pints of it, was cut off and threw a glass at the bartender. Billy was the first person we fired. In an age when winter beers were invariably dark, and often spiced, Bifrost was like a ray of strong sunshine (it was also an age when winter beers were released in the wintertime, not August).

With lots of pale malt augmented only by a little 77° crystal and some Munich malt, Bifrost is a strong pale ale with a good amount of hop character (55 IBU, bittered with Magnum and finished with a combination of Amarillo and Styrian Goldings). Its name, however wintry it might sound, comes from the rainbow bridge linking Asgard, the Norse realm of the gods, with Earth.